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Skinner ADMIN (1000+ posts) Wed Jun-15-11 10:16 AM
Original message
It's clear that there are some hard feelings surrounding discussion of LGBT issues here on DU.
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Edited on Wed Jun-15-11 10:55 AM by Skinner
And I think some of you need a place to hash this out. There have been a few attempts to work through this, which is good.

Unfortunately, I think those attempts have been stymied by our efforts to enforce the DU rules, which has had the unintended consequence of creating more hard feelings, and making honest discussion difficult. The purpose of rules is foster productive discussions, but in this case I think the rules are having the opposite effect.

If one thing is totally obvious, it's that I can't make you get along, and I can't make you talk to each other and understand each other, and I can't make you happy. You need to do that yourselves. By getting myself out of the way, I hope that some of you might be able to hash this out.

So, I am posting this thread where interested DUers can engage in an unfiltered and uncensored discussion. I am instructing the moderators not to delete any posts, so don't bother alerting. This thread is for you all to actually engage in a discussion with each other, rather than sending tit-for-tat alerts in hopes of getting the moderators to censor people.

Obviously feelings are very raw, many DUers feel misunderstood and disrespected, and I know that there is a good chance this discussion will get very hot. To be honest, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe, once people have had a chance to blow off steam, we can finally make some progress.

Both times I was at DU, I was often surprised at how stupidly a post could be interpreted by hypersensitive, intoxicated, or mentally ill people. Acceptance is very important to a great many people there, and so they allow a handful of angry and extreme bullies to define the orthodoxy.

I often ran afoul of these bitches (male and female) in the gay forum. They are always on high alert for a "mole" or a "troll" which they define as anyone who doesn't buy into whatever the current bullshit being taught at Berkeley or written about by deep people you never heard of. There are three kinds: the ones who work for the government, the ones who work for nonprofits, and the ones on anti-psychotics.